Saturday

Nov 30, 2013 at 12:01 AMDec 1, 2013 at 3:51 PM

My former boss at The Dispatch once told me that the only person in town who is second-guessed more often than the newspaper editor is the Ohio State football coach. The truth is that we even second-guess ourselves.

My former boss at The Dispatch once told me that the only person in town who is second-guessed more often than the newspaper editor is the Ohio State football coach.

The truth is that we even second-guess ourselves.

It’s healthy to ask ourselves whether we’d make the same decisions with the benefit of hindsight, and how we can learn from those decisions.

On Monday night, as we juggled late-breaking stories, we made some decisions that we believe were correct. As I hung up the phone after talking with News Editor Danny Goodwin at about 10:30 p.m., I thought about whether readers would make the same decisions.

Achieving unanimous agreement is impossible, but your emails and letters always help us understand where you stand on certain issues. And we value your feedback.

One of the decisions we made late in the evening involved a story about an elderly brother and sister who were living in a garage in Athens County. The garage became their home when their house burned down about two years ago, leaving them to live without a bathroom or running water.

The 88-year-old woman was found burned so severely by a kerosene heater that her leg appeared to have melted into the chair on which she sat. The 73-year-old man was naked. The garage was in deplorable condition, with the deputy sheriff describing it as being crammed with trash and debris, including waist-high piles of feces and mounds of rotting food.

The question two copy editors asked: Would identifying them be fair?

I’m not repeating the names now because I don’t want to be gratuitous, but we named them in the news story.

Our thinking: They had done nothing wrong and were in obvious need of help. Friends or family members who have lost touch with the siblings would want to know that they were in need, both financially and emotionally. And, candidly, our community is full of generous people with the desire and ability to help them.

Some will believe the story is sensational — because the facts are hard to fathom. But we published their story on an inside page, not Page One. I would hope reasonable people will not accuse us of printing the story or naming these folks to sell newspapers, because you had to buy the paper to find the story.

We decided not to name the siblings in a follow-up story for today’s paper because today’s news is less about them and more about an alarming spike in the number of self-neglect cases involving the elderly in Ohio.

As we wrap up our week of Thanksgiving, aren’t we thankful for law-enforcement officers such as Mike Burba, who sensed something was wrong and was able to talk himself inside the Athens County garage? We can only imagine what would have happened to the seniors had he not been so persistent.

Before deciding whether to name these folks in the first story, we had to decide whether to use a quote from Ohio State coach Urban Meyer.

At his weekly Monday news conference, the coach was explaining when he fully understood how intense the rivalry is with Michigan.

Columnist Bob Hunter quoted Meyer: “Yeah, it was kind of funny. I was driving to work on a Monday morning. I was a 21-year-old graduate assistant, and I look up on those twin towers by the stadium, and it says ‘Muck Fichigan’ (on the) sheets hanging off. I said, ‘That is really cool right there.’?.?.?. Someone made them take it down.”

The quote gave me pause.

Use it? Don’t use it?

We did. Here’s why: We know that in his short tenure at Ohio State, Meyer has proved to be a skilled communicator. He says what he thinks, and thinks about what he says. He didn’t use foul language in this case, but in telling the story helped everyone understand the intensity of the rivalry.

Besides, I’ve seen the expression is on T-shirts around town for years.

So, readers, what would you have done?

Benjamin J. Marrison is editor of The Dispatch. You can read his blog at dispatch.com/blogs.

bmarrison@dispatch.com

@dispatcheditor

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